Phew…Quite the post title.
Instead of live posting every moment of our trip, I decided to wait until I come home to do it. I had many reasons to why I waited and I’ve been doing this practice for the last few trips with the exception of a few.
We don’t have a roommate or someone watching the house
This is my primary reason to why I don’t post live on social media. It tells people the house is empty and attracts people to break in to rob or vandalize your home. There would be times where we would share live, but we either had a roommate living with us or a family member staying in watching the house. Safety is more important than social status.
It takes a lot of time
I finally got around to posting on my social media. Speaking of which, follow me on Instagram and my Facebook page! Side note: I am still figuring out how to use my Facebook page for my blog. It’s been going through quite a bit of iterations.
Anyways, I forgot it takes quite a bit of time to share. It has nothing to do with choosing the perfect filter since I don’t filter or modify any of my photos. Yesterday, when I was sharing photos of my 36 hours in Milan, it took me some time to choose which photos, type a caption, attempt in micro-blogging, and share it on all my social media platforms. To me, it is that nagging thing each day when I come back to the hotel. At least when I am home, I can enjoy my travels more because I can use it to reflect. It’s kind of like a project where I share pieces of it throughout the week.
The cellular network and WiFi may not always be plentiful
When I am abroad, I rely on WiFi rather than cellular network because the speed at max 2G rather than 4G back home. If I were to share on social media in real-time, uploading would suck a lot of battery throughout the day. When we went to Peru (and I promise there will be more content for Peru), I did not quite post these photos in real time. I posted at the end of each day at our accommodations.
In our last trip, two of the hotels we stayed in had good WiFI, but two out of the three AirBNBs had less than reliable WiFi. Since I already made a decision to not post until I come back, I was not too concerned about being connected all the time. If connectivity is that important to me, I would have hung out at McDonald’s for the WiFi. But who want to do that? Unless you’re eating at McDonald’s.
I don’t overshare. Instead, I curate and do storytelling.
Delaying my posts allows me to tell the story of my trip rather than bombard people with picture after picture. A lot of the times, these pictures shared in real time are terrible.
Instead of making my photos the star of the trip, I wanted my stories and observations to take front and center. I am not talking about a history lesson or spew out random facts about a landmark even those are okay, but anybody can go on Wikipedia to copy and paste facts for their captions.
I wanted to share my most frequent phrases in a foreign language, observations on how the rest of the world sees United States culture, a conversation I had with a local, and opinions. I wanted to share a more enriched travel story rather than show the superficial. There is nothing telling behind captions like “Slice of life” or “Views on views” or “Woke up in paradise” or “Should do this (what’s that?) more often.”
Right: When learning and speaking Italian, I struggled saying words that had an “sf” and “gl.”
Source: My Instagram stories
Source: My Instagram stories
Do you share your photos on social media during your trip? Share below!
Eat, Play, Live 